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Thursday, 20 September 2018

September: seasons of mists, mellow fruitfulness - and the London Poetry Book Fair!!!

V. Press is very very delighted to be heading to London for Free Verse, the annual Poetry Book Fair, on Saturday.

This year the fair has been organised by The Poetry Society, and takes place at a new venue: Senate House (William Beveridge Hall), London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, from 11am to 5pm.

Free Verse is an all-day bazaar, market, library, meeting place, performance venue, information resource and more. Celebrating the vitality of contemporary poetry in the UK, publishers and organisations both large and small, both experimental and traditional, display and sell their work direct to the public.

More than 80 publishers and poetry organisations are taking part this year, with the event also offering workshops and daytime readings.

More about this year's fair can be found here. Meanwhile, here at V. Press, we're busy packing and planning special sales offers. It's always so lovely to be able to meet readers in person, so please do stop by and say hello!

Tuesday, 4 September 2018

V. Press is very very delighted to launch Helen Calcutt's debut poetry collection Unable Mother.“This work challenges our abstract and cosy notions of motherhood with
a brutal and vulnerable delve into the psyche. Calcutt grapples, sometimes
violently, sometimes with aching tenderness, each hard-won line ‘like squeezing
/ flesh and fruit from the bone, / this terrible love’. Yet these poems reach
even further, into the rent world, and the remarkable kinds of beauty to which
poetry alone can allude. This is an intimate book, the kind that comes in close to
your ear to whisper dark secrets and unavoidable truths. These poems are spare,
careful, insistent--and devastatingly good.” Robert Peake

“Helen Calcutt’s poems are full of surprising and intricate moments -
they unfold like origami, deftly packing and unpacking themselves into new
forms and presenting the reader with confidences, secrets and insight, the
tender words for the things that are hard to say. In their explorations of
motherhood, loss and discovery, Calcutt’s poetry is steeled with precise
language, always finding clarity forged in the heart of experience. These
are intimate poems which are felt in the body, and written with a keen
physicality – ‘love is meant to live on in the body’ writes Calcutt,
‘My flesh making heaven of it.’ In their makings and re-makings, each poem here
reveals this to be a remarkable and potent debut.” Jane Commane